In his first week in office, Trump seized control of all of the centers of state violence. He fired career staff and installed personal loyalists at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the FBI, the intelligence agencies, and ICE. If you are contemplating a coup down the road, the first order of business is to ensure the loyalty of the military and the national police.

Trump, following the fascist playbook, also appointed senior officials whose main qualification was their incompetence. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism back in 1951, the worst kind of dictator “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” Has anyone written a better description of RFK Jr. and Pete Hegseth?

Then Trump used threats of primaries to coerce the rubber-stamp loyalty of Republicans in Congress, even though many had serious qualms about some of his policies. No previous president has ever managed this degree of party unanimity.

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Early on, Trump orchestrated an extralegal crackdown on immigrants to normalize the kidnapping of families by masked secret police. The sweeps sometimes arrested citizens and legal foreign residents along with undocumented ones. Local officials who objected were arrested.

Next, Trump acted to neutralize centers of independent thought in civil society, using extortionate demands and the leverage of federal funding, as if it were his private money. Many universities and prestigious law firms capitulated with surprising ease.

Despite Trump’s impulsive, contradictory actions and his use of the presidency for private deals to line his own pockets, all this is classic fascist methodology. Though Trump’s off-script monologues suggest cognitive impairment bordering on dementia, he is not too impaired to carry out each systematic stage of the march to fascism.

UNTIL THIS PAST WEEK, there was one anomaly. A president known for extreme vanity, narcissism, and a penchant for vengeance was subject to extensive investigative reporting by a still-free press, as well as ridicule by late-night comics. That could not stand.

Trump selectively uses instruments of the state to crush perceived enemies when that proves convenient. As our colleague Paul Starr writes, the use of the FCC to ensure ideological conformity in the broadcast media is unprecedented.

I worry that the mainstream media are sitting ducks. Self-censorship and pitiful efforts to be evenhanded have not helped. Although Trump’s $15 billion libel suit against The New York Times was laughed out of court, Trump and his billionaire allies could well keep flooding the zone with costly and less frivolous defamation suits. Trump’s allies in Congress could attempt to overturn Times v. Sullivan, which sets a high bar for libel suits by public figures. The Pentagon has also taken the first step toward a de facto Official Secrets Act by demanding that credentialed reporters sign a pledge not to obtain or publish unauthorized material. (The press and even Republican lawmakers are pushing back against this.)

Though Trump’s off-script monologues suggest cognitive impairment bordering on dementia, he is not too impaired to carry out each systematic stage of the march to fascism.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, of all people, strenuously objected to the FCC censoring media. He described FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s crude pressure to fire Jimmy Kimmel as “dangerous as hell … He says, ‘We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.’ And I gotta say, that’s right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

Cruz later added: “I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying, ‘We’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying.’”

And on Monday afternoon, Disney, parent of ABC, announced that Kimmel would return to the air.

And so the dialectic of despotism and pushback continues.

Trump is using the assassination of Charlie Kirk to brand normal political opposition as treason. This is also straight out of the fascist playbook. Although speaker after speaker at Kirk’s memorial deplored violence, Trump has been conspicuously silent when right-wing assassins murder mainstream Democrats, and we could see more such violence.

Yet in The Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove wrote a column titled “‘They’ Didn’t Kill Charlie Kirk.” He wrote, “Using Charlie’s murder to justify retaliation against political rivals is wrong and dangerous. It will further divide and embitter our country. No good thing will come of it.”

WHAT ELSE REMAINS TO BE DONE in Trump’s march to outright despotism? More worrying than threats against individual channels or comedians, Trump has now declared war on the entire ecosystem of progressive nonprofit research institutions, threatening RICO prosecutions. A crusade against their tax exemptions could be next, as I warned in a piece last year.

We are still on track to have relatively free and fair elections in the 2026 midterms and in off-year elections between now and then. Trump has made noises about taking control of all elections, and defining voting fraud broadly to intimidate voters, but so far it’s only noise.

The gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia this November will probably go off normally, and the Democrat is favored to win in both states. However, as Trump promotes and valorizes violence of the kind that he tried to use on January 6, 2021, to overturn his own defeat in the 2020 election, that could depress turnout in 2026.

We also still have independent courts. The Supreme Court has been delaying rendering final rulings in key cases, but it can’t delay much longer; and Trump could lose several key cases where he asserted extreme autocratic power, such as his supposed right to overturn birthright citizenship and to fire Federal Reserve governors.

We recently posted a piece of mine called “Can Resistance Succeed?” I still believe that the more extreme are Trump’s actions, they more they generate reactions, even from Republicans.

If you look at nations that came back from despotism, the dynamics are worth study. In some cases, such as Germany, it took a war. But in other cases, such as Poland, Brazil, and Chile, a far-right repressive regime that governed badly as well as despotically gradually lost the confidence of the broad public and of key elites and had to relinquish power. That was also true of Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal once the dictator died.

In both Hungary and Poland, the regime replaced civil servants with loyalist hacks, cracked down on independent media, and vilified local officials from the opposition. But Hungary under Viktor Orbán managed to rig the electoral system, while Poland’s far-right Law and Justice party, which governed between 2015 and 2023, couldn’t quite manage it. So in 2023, the voters threw the rascals out.

Relatively free elections are still the best guarantee against dictatorship. And America is not a fascist state—yet.

Needless to say, there are no guarantees that democracy, once lost, will be restored. It is far better to fend off fascism before it takes hold.